In this part, we want to give anoverview about our thesis. This will provide readers thestructure of our thesis as well as brief information about what we have done in every chapter. Italso helps readers to navigate easier through the document and understand the objective ofevery chapter.

Chapter 1-

Introduction

As the first part of the thesis, we introduce our initial visionand objectives

about the researcharea-

online advertising.

We have show the growth of online advertising in the world and howpotential online advertising inVietnam is.We also figure the current state of online advertisingin Vietnam and why it is considered in early state. In the last part of the chapter, we introduceour solution for the current situation: Online Advertising Distribution System (OADS) andthetargets that we aimed to when developing the system.

Chapter 2-

Literature Review

In this chapter, we present the results of our researches about online advertising industry. Itincludes some current important problems and their impacts to thedevelopment

of onlineadvertising industry in Vietnam. We also provide short reviews

both in business and in technical

sides

about similar systems

that are currently successful in the world likeDoubleClick, GoogleAdsense, Google Adwords, and Chikita.This helps us not only to understand the currentsituation of online advertising industry

but also the advantages and disadvantages ofcontemporary advertising systems

in Vietnam.This chapter builds the base-understandings forour further research in this thesis as well as provides

readers with a broad understanding aboutonline advertising in Vietnam and in the world.

Chapter 3-

Business needs analysis

Basing on the information and understandings collected on the previous chapter, we start togather andanalyze the needs of the industry in order to develop our online advertising model.

all theinformation related with current business scenario and what we have figured out for OADSfeatures including the detail requirements and expectations for the Advertisement Distribution,Tracking and Report, as well as other management operations can be performed in OADS.

Chapter 4-

System modeling

After defining the business model and requirements for OADS, we model the system in thetechnical view. In short, we can consider this as system analysis and design phase in thedevelopment

life cycle, in which we point out our selection for the architecture of the system.

vi

The system model will show you the overview about the system structure from thehigh-level

the quality of the system such as Content analyzer withtaxonomyclassification

and fraud filters with filtering policy.

Chapter 5-

Implementation and evaluation

In this chapter, we present the selections of technologies and techniques that we used toimplement OADS at client side, application server side, and database server side. We also haverather detail descriptions about how we organize and implement the important parts of eachapplication layer. For example, database implementation details, advertisement distributionscenarios, action tracking cases, taxonomy algorithm, fraud managementscenarios etc.

In addition to implementation activities, evaluation isnecessary

for any demonstration. In theevaluation part, we show the assessment based on validation includingfeedback’s

reports ofpeople that did survey or we interviewed. We make a comparison between OADS and the mostsuccessfullocal online advertising system

like

VnExpress.net,

too.Finally, we review what wehave done from thebeginning to

the end of development phase of OADS including its strengthsand weaknesses.

Chapter 6-

Epilogue

The final chapter, we

give the

conclusionabout what we have done

in OADSand

discussed

about

what we have learned and discover through doing

thesis.We describe ourthoughtsabout the

knowledge we have gained through a longterm of study andbydoingthisthesis. It

includes

howdoing this thesis has

brought us into a new level of understanding howtechnologieshave changed real businesses nowadays. The last part is abouta shortplan for

furtherdevelopment

of OADS, which is about what we are expecting to do if we continue inresearching and deploying OADS into real world.

This is also the last chapter of our thesis.

1

CHAPTER 1-

INTRODUCTION

1.1.

VISION AND SCOPE

Advertising is one of most important activities of every brand or company nowadays. It takes amajor part in the development of each company by increasing sales revenues through makingcustomers be familiar withproducts and services.

There are many ways and media used for advertising such as newspaper, television, brochure,radio…However, the effectiveness of advertising methods andthemeasurement of

it is still abig issue needed to be considered nowadays.In 1965, advertiser only needs three times ofdisplaying his advertisement on television in peak viewing time, in three consecutive days toreach up to 90% ofhousewife

class get acquainted with the brand. However, in 2002, in orderto get the same effect,

an advertiser needs to display advertisement up to 137 times (accordingto Mediapost and Gallup Organization). It is clear that traditional advertising media are moreand more ineffective.

A new advertising method that has come after Internet invented is online advertising. Onlineadvertising (in the broadest sense, it is also known as Digital Advertising) has been one of themost successful business models.

It is said that

online advertising

revenues will double frommore than $21 billion in 2007 to$42 billion in 2011

(according to Interactive Advertising Bureauof Canada).One of successful factor of online advertising is online campaign run across multiplesites (According to BrandChannel). It takes the advantages of Internet environment to make theconnection between organizations and their customers no matter when and where theircustomers are. As usual, when advertisers want to run online advertising campaigns, they haveto contact with different websites/blogs (publishers) that they want to show

theiradvertisements. However, this approach is still time-consuming and not cost-effective. Morethan that, nowadays, most advertisers know the power of online advertising and take itsadvantages to create and improve their advertising programs. Therefore, who will reachcustomers first and have bigger customer networks is another issue also.

We

recognize

that finding out and developing a new online advertising model suitable toVietnam environment is not only an urgent need but also a big opportunity.

1.2.

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY

Online advertising is young in Vietnambecause traditional advertising media stilltake a major part in advertising revenues.

However,

the situation is changing since theInternet and e-commerce in Vietnam arecurrently developing rapidly. More than 20%of Vietnam population use Internet(according to report in 7/2007 of VNNIC andInternet World Stats). However, thecurrentrevenue thatonline advertising contributes toadvertising industry is less than 5% of theOnline Ad.TVFigure1

-

Advertising Market Share in Vietnam 2008

2

total advertising market share.The methodologies and technologies applied in onlineadvertising in Vietnam are quite old and ineffective. That is one of the reasons that even though

online advertising in Vietnam is a very promising industry but still having not developed yet. Ifthere is a solution for online advertising in Vietnam that changes the way people are thinkingabout it, standardizes the business process, makes onlineadvertising become more effectiveand attractive, that breakthrough solution would solve the current problem and helpcontributing to bring online advertising into a higher level of mature and development.

1.3.

VISION OFSOLUTION

By researching, we have found

outone

solution for the

above

problems,and

itcan

help moveonline advertising Vietnam into a new era to catch up with theworld.It is Online AdvertisingDistribution System (OADS).The basic idea of OADSis to connect publishers into a

classifiedadvertising network and then when an advertiser want to advertise, he/she just need to easilywork with OADS agency with a defined simple process. OADS does not only simplify the processbut also providesmany

important features to help the online advertising more effective. OADSprovides a shortcut for advertisers to introduce their products, services or even brands to endusers who could need to buy their products, use their services, or get information about

thebrand. OADS also assures that advertisers’ advertisement will be seen by real people and helpsadvertisers to evaluate the effectiveness of theirs advertising campaigns. These tasks will bedone via fraud detection and managementSub-Systems includedin OADS. The reportingSub-System

will take part in providing publishers and advertisers concrete reports on how theadvertisements running. It will keep track everything from how many clicks, impressions, howmuch advertisers have to pay, how much publishers have earned etc…

The whole system has to be built in the way thatit is

easy to use and understand the models fornew users (advertisers/publishers) when applying in real world.

3

2.

CHAPTER 2-

LITERATURE

REVIEW

In this chapter, we are going to get anoverview of current online advertising in Vietnam withconsidering deeply about its issues and impacts to beginning understand why we need to solvethe problems and why OADS will be supposed to help. In the remaining

part of the chapter, wewillreview

the

most updated and successful advertising systems

in the world. This couldprovide an overview about what is going on and should be expected when we build OADS, aquite similar system but

is open-source, free, multi-language support, and

more suitable forVietnam

advertising

market. In our philosophy, innovation sometimes is not just about buildingsomething brand new, not really building something that better than existing ones, but simplybuilding something open and free for people to use, to study and change it, and tocontributeto make it better.

Online advertising has been considered as a trend that helps companies save cost and reachpotential customers in a more effective way.However,

in fact, online advertisingin

Vietnam isstill in the early state and its effectiveness is still

very

modest.The

online advertising

businessmodel isnot really attractive and profitable as it should be. Here are some main reasons.

2.1.1.1.

Applying old

& low effective

models

One

problem when

applying web-advertising models in Vietnam is that it has not demonstratedto bring a good effectiveness as it is expected.

Figure2

-

A site that is full of advertising as Vnexpress.net is notsupposed to bring good effectiveness to its advertisers sincethe CTR (Click through Rate) is very low.

The problem is not simply

about not fully understanding the business models of onlineadvertising

but also laying in technical side, for example,the usability of thewebsites

that makevisitors not likely to click on the advertisements

or most of the time, the website displays wrongadvertisements to wrong segment of customers.

4

Advertisers

usually

have to buy the whole ad placeholder for a time span (usually 1 week or 1month) with a specific price but cannot make payment based on performance like CPM (costper thousand impressions) or CPC (Cost per click). They even cannot have detail reports on howtheir advertisements perform like how many clicks aremade, how many times theadvertisements are displayetc.

As a result, even thought the web advertising market of Vietnam is promised to be a bigmarket, web-advertising models currently applied are still not very successful

and need to beimproved a lot before it can really bring revenue.

2.1.1.2.

Impacts

Since the effectiveness of online advertising has not been demonstrated having good result,advertisers usually just think about online advertising as an additional part of a marketingcampaign. Advertisers do not trust and think online advertising that much important comparingto other kinds ofadvertising like TV, print etc. Online advertising has not yet broughtgreatimpacts

into advertising industry.

Comparing to the development of online advertising in theworld,

which is bringing billions ofdollars a years, online advertising market of Vietnam is still very tiny. Many big brands stillchoose TV as a main marketing tool and have not realize how important and advanced theonline advertising is and how they can use it as a great mean to reach potential customers withmuch smaller cost. One of the main reasons replies on the old perception and traditional viewof marketing methods.

Advertisers and marketers should know how an online advertising campaign is different fromtraditional advertising campaign and how the power of technology is changing the advertisingindustry. By this approach, more and more people and advertisers will understand theimportant of online advertising nowadays, and therefore, more chances for online advertisingto grow in Vietnam.

2.1.2.

Underutilization of online advertising advantages

2.1.2.1.

Deficient understanding of online advertising

The advertisingindustry and DotCom

industry in Vietnam have not had a fully understandingabout the advantages of online advertising. There is a realization about the transition fromtraditional media (TV, print, radio etc.) into social media (web, blog, social networks etc.) butwhat most of people think about online advertising is that is just instead of displaying banneron print or TVC on TV, now displaying them on web. The online advertising demonstrates itssuperior advantages comparing to traditional media not just by the increase of number ofvisitors but also by the advantages that its technology provide.

There are also differences in planning, executing, tracking/conversion between traditionaladvertising and online advertising. An online advertising campaign, everything should becontrolled almost by technology, changing during the campaign also is managed

by technology.The lack of fully understanding how to run online advertising campaign makes low effectiveresult of the campaign. This could also make people have wrong judgment or underestimationof the effective of online advertising.

Companies that apply online advertising models in Vietnam also do not provide acomprehensive benefit of online advertising about costs, technology advantages to their

5

potential customers. They also have not built the comprehensive tool to manage and trackadvertising. For

example, most of Vietnamese advertisers do not know that in an onlineadvertising campaign, they can have a real time report about performance of advertising, andthen they can adjust for a better performance. Usually, after the campaign finishes they have tospend addiction money to analyze the effective of the campaign and calculate the ROI (Returnof Investment) like advertise in traditional media. Those obstacles contribute a lot to thedifficulty when applying online advertising models into Vietnam.

2.1.2.2.

Underutilization of web advertising advantages

In global size, Companies like DoubleClick or Google provide behavioral advertising andcontent-targeted advertising services. With behavioral advertising, user’s information andactivities are like age, sex, favorite websites/content are tracked and mined, and then throughbrowser cookie the system can detect users’ identity to provide the appropriate advertisementto the users’ segment. This is almost could not be done in traditional media like TV since itcannot know correctly who is watching in front of the TV. As a result, TV can show wrongadvertisements to wrong users at the wrong time.

Those technologies mentioned above even thought have a great development in the world butstillbrand new in Vietnam.

The underutilization of technology applied in web advertising makeonline advertising business markets of Vietnam being limited to a number of well-understanding people and organizations.

The development of online advertising business of Vietnam is in earlystate. The market size isbig but there is still lack of convincible successful examples that can make advertisers toconsider online advertising a big part in their marketing plan. One of biggest reason is thatVietnam online advertising businesses stillcannot provide an entire solution including fromplanning, executing to technology-based tools that can show the deep and breath benefit ofonline advertising.

2.1.2.3.

Impacts

When people just simply think that Internet is just another type of media, and they dothemarketing in the same way as traditional advertising in traditional media (simple displaybanner/video ads), they do not make the most of advantages of web advertising. Thoseadvantages like tracking user’s segment (gender, ages, hobbies etc.) or content-targetadvertising if not applied in Internet advertising will make online advertise just alike thetraditional advertising. In addition, this leads

to the current situation of Vietnam onlineadvertising:

advertisers have not realized a real value of online advertising.

This limitation makes it difficult for web advertising to overcome traditional advertising in nextfew years. On the other hands, online advertising cannot reach many segments as TV can dolike farmers (above 60 % population of Vietnam).Currently, the only way for online advertisingin Vietnam is maximizing its advantages to maximize profits from its reached audience. To dothis, web-advertising businesses need to do more research in online advertising technology anddemonstrate its superior benefit

around 43 minutes each day. Up to the present, there is no similarresearch done in other areas but we can assure that those statistic numbers willbe decreasedin poorer areas.

Figure3

-

Online Service in Vietnam

The research reports also show that 79% of VietnamInternet

users are from 15 to 19 years old.Those are not really potential users for web advertising because most of them are ones who aredepended in finance of their families. Meanwhile, most of services and businesses needpotential customers who have abilities to actively manage their financial issues.

2.1.3.2.

VietnamInternet

infrastructure

Internet

infrastructure inVietnam develops rapidly in recent years with very high growth rate200% per year (according to Vietnamnet.vn). However, this development is centralized inimportant centers and big cities while other areas still face many difficulties in developing theInternet

infrastructure in particular and information technology infrastructure in general. At thepresent, most ofInternet

service subscribers use broadbandInternet

ADSL but in fact there is alot of complains about the service quality theInternet

service providers provide.

020406080100NewsEmailChat/IMBlog%

Online Service

Online Service Usage

Online Service

7

In other aspect, web adverting and ecommerce have a very strong relationship. They are handin hand. Ecommerce provides needs and demands for web advertisingto develop

while webadvertising motivates the development of ecommerce. However, ecommerce in Vietnam is stillat starting point of the development due to the weakness and incompleteness of itssupplement services, especially payment or logistics services in Vietnam.

2.1.3.3.

Impacts

Like any other business, the motivation for web advertising to develop is originated fromconsumers. Consumers are

the

targets, which provide demands and determine the trends anddirections of web advertising. Web advertising in Vietnam currently have a big problem relatedto consumers.In addition, themain area that produces demands for online advertising is e-commerce has not been developed and no complete legal framework has been established forweb advertising in Vietnam.

This reduces the enthusiasms, expectations, and motivation ofadvertisers.Consequently, they are cautious to invest in web advertising. For

a

long-termdevelopment, web advertising is negatively affected by this fact because those are ones whomake decision of using web advertising or not and determine the investment level for webadvertising if it is selected.

While big Vietnam online newspapers, which attract most of web traffic of Vietnam, cannotspend more capital and resources for web advertising because their specialization is providingcontent and news, not web advertising.There is

still no company that specializes in webadvertising is really considered successful. This results Vietnam web advertising industry doesnot have diversity as other developed countries do. This also decreases the competition, whichis required forany development.

advertising. Itsimbalanced development and the inconsistence between web advertising and e-commercemake web advertising cannot be spread out and create a breakthrough in Vietnam webadvertising industry.

Web advertising has not been given obvious opportunities to develop. Its advantages have notbeen entirely recognized by advertisers, companies, and people who have abilities, powers, andresponsibilities to the development of digital advertising in Vietnam. According to the researchof Yahoo and TNS Media, the average duration Vietnamese users spend on usingInternet

is 43minutes per day. It is equal to twice of the duration they spend on watching television and 8times of that on reading newspaper (according to IDC research).In contrast, televisionadvertising still takes almost 80% of local market share (according to VietnamBranding.com). InVietnam, only 31.31% of companies have their own websites for introducing information aboutthe companies toInternet

users. And among them, there are quite few companies understatingthe needs of advertisingafter building the websites. It is clear that the investment for webadvertising is not as it should be.

The number of companies working on advertising areas is large in Vietnam but there are a fewones among those specializing in web advertising or digital advertising

such asVietnamNet,24H,andVnExpress

etc.

Advertisers who want to run online advertising campaigns do not havemany choices due to the inflexibility of the web advertising models these providers are using.

8

2.2.

COMTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL ONLINE ADVERTISINGSYSTEMS REVIEW

2.2.1.

Google

From the very beginning when trying to find way to earn money from their search engine,Google’s founders have thought about

a way to use their search engine as a tool to detectusers’ need when they search, then display relevant text advertisements beside the searchresults. That was a big success from the beginning. Later, they build up a bigger system, which isnot only displaying advertisements in their result page but also in their partners’ websites.

Google divide its system into two

products: Adsense–

for publishers who want to displayadvertisements into their site to earn money and Adwords–

advertisers who want to displayadvertisements in search result page and publishers’ sites. This has recently become one of themost successful business model inInternet

which bring Google become one of the most fast-growing company ever.

2.2.1.1.

Google Adsense

Overview

Many websites around the world, especially small ones, have been usingAdsenseto

monetizetheir content. These websites including big websites like New York Times (nytimes.com) tosmall blogs like Lifehacker.org … three most advantages ofAdsenseare:

o

It helps small websites, which do not have sale department to earn money easily justenrolling inAdsense

program. Does not need to own a website withtraffic

100.000/dayto earn money withAdsense

o

It works on performance-based, which isPay-per-Click (PPC), how much apublisher

willFigure4

-

A sample of Google text/link advertisements

9

earn depending on how many timesvisitors

click on the advertisements.

o

Adsense distribute advertisements smartly based on relevant information. For example,a forum about mobile phone will be automatically displayed ads of Nokia etc… This leadto the click-through-rate is very high comparing to traditional static banneradvertisements.

Source of these advertisements are from the Adwords service where advertisers pay money toplace their ads in Google search result or Adsense network sites.

Technology view

Google uses a web crawler called Media-bot, a robot similar to contentcrawler of its searchengine, but Media-bot just indexes those website enrollingAdsene

programs. After crawling thecontent, Google will analyze these contents with complex methods to categorize these webpages based onkeywords. Then, Google engine willdetect which advertisements are suitable todisplay in every webpage.

For publishers, to display advertisements, they have to include a small piece ofJavaScript

codeinto their website. Every time a visitor visits the website, thisJavaScript

code will calltoAdsense engine to generatesuitableads.

Currently, this is a solid solution to distribute and displayads, which bring Google andpublishers around the world billions of dollars per month. However, there are still manylimitations such as the distribution system is just based onArtificial Intelligent algorithm

without any manual manipulation and interaction, there are many cases that advertisementscannot be displayed correctly with the visitors need. For example: a kid visits an

educationwebsiteabout Henry Ford for the preparation of the history class, but it displays advertisementof Ford car, which is not interested by that kid, and that kid also does not belong to targetaudience of Ford car advertisement. Another example, a person is lookingand readinginformation for a house in Ho Chi Minh City, but it can display the advertisements about ahouse for sell in Hanoi, which is not in the interest of that person.

2.2.1.2.

Google Adwords

Overview

With the philosophy that Google want to build a marketingtool that, for example, when peoplepay 1000$ in marketing, the system will guarantee 5000$ in return for that investment,Adwords works on performance-based with heavily on based on end users’ needs. Not simplyadvertisers only have to pay for those clicks that have been made, but Google want these clicksmust be efficiency as much as possible. It is more about quality than quantity of the clicks thatadvertiser have to pay for. That makes the difference.

There are mainly 2 places that an ad can be display when anAdvertiser

pays for advertising withAdwords:

10

o

Search Engine: is when end users search for something in Google search, there will berelated advertisements displayed.

Because of its commitment in providing high quality return for marketing investment, Googlenot only keeps improving its ability to display correct ads that fit customer’s need when theysurfing websites but also it builds a very strong fraud protection system which is help toguarantee thatevery click made is real and not made by malicious activities. However, as arecently research, there is still more than 10% of clicks considered fraud.

Technical View

Two main functions of the Adwords are collecting advertisements for Adsense todistribute andreporting. Adwords works in web-based environments and can be accessed by anyone throughweb browers.

2.2.2.

Double click

Overview

Different to Google with text and link advertisements, DoubleClick uses image asadvertisement. The publishing advertisement approach of Double Click is also different incomparison with that of Google. DoubleClick buys advertisement positions on big and hightraffic websites (publishers),and then

works with advertising agencies to sell theseadvertisements.

Established in the end of 90s, DoubleClick has survived through the dot Com bubble inbeginning of 2000s. Its main product is called DART, which provides solution to administrate theadvertisement buying cycle for advertisers and publishers. Because of displaying banneradvertisements, DoubleClick charges advertisers in both ways Payper

Click (PPC) and Costper

Thousand Impression (CPM).

Technical overview

DoubleClick has been trying to display advertisement in the way that is more efficient foradvertiser and publishers. In other words, it always tries to display right advertisements to theright web viewers, which will increase the click percentage

and the quality of every click. Bythat way, publishers can earn more and advertisers not wasting much money in displayadvertisements to wrong target.

To reach the goal, DoubleClick has built a tool to collect users’ data, including IP address,domain,browser, local time and date, operating system, and page viewed… DoubleClickcollects this information during the time users visiting websites belonging to DoubleClick’snetwork and will store in data center. By analyzing this information, DoubleClick canproducestatistics to improve their advertisement displaying method.Moreover,

every time users comeback to a website, DoubleClick can detect some information like gender, age, location, or eveninterest…, which

helps

them provideadvertisements that aremore suitable

to those users. By

11

that way, it will also help not to display wrong advertisement to wrong users, like displaying caradvertisement to kids.

2.2.3.

Chitika

Overview

The development of Chitika attached with the development of web 2.0. Chitika is thepioneer inwidget advertising. After registering with Chitika, publishers (mainly small websites or bloggers)will get the HTML segment and paste it on their websites/blogs. These HTML segment, workslike a widget, which is embedded into a webpage position

like sidebar and then displaysadvertisements such as mobile phone, books etc… with short description. When users click onthese items, Chitika will redirect them to destination website like Amazon, Ebay, or other onlineshops etc… for purchasing the products. In other hands, publishers do not sell products; Chitikadoes not sell any products either. They just build widgets on publishers’ web pages and sellthem to online shops or advertisers.

Figure5

-

a

sample of Chitika Advertisement

Technical overview

In general, Chitika provides widget, which heavily based on JavaScript.Instead of displaying linkadvertisements or banneradvertisements, the widget look

more like natural online shops'

out-look.Chitika also builds middle pages to redirect to the real online shop and tracking visitors’activity.

The way it displays ad is quite simple, it let publishers choose which type of products they wantto advertise (or in other words,sell) in their websites and got the HTML segment withJavaScript code embedded and paste it into theirweb pages. Every time a visitor visits thewebpage, these JavaScript codes

will call back to Chitika server to request information aboutthe advertisement information to display such as product name, image, price, description etc…or sometimes, even price comparison from different online shops. The content of the widgetthen becomes very dynamic, sometimes, if the Chitika web service cannot find suitable items,the widget can display a search box for visitors to search products right in the publishers’websites.

12

3.

CHAPTER3–

BUSINESS NEEDS ANALYSIS

To havea better understanding about the current business need of the advertising distributionsystem inVietnam, we have made a small research by interviewing

and surveying

the mainstakeholders of the systems: advertisers and publishers. The purpose of the interviews is tofigure what functions, what kind of reports, and how the system would satisfy their businessneeds.The detail of the survey result can be foundin the appendix of this document.

Advertisers here are mainly marketing managers of different type companies, or mediaplanning manager of advertising agencies or media companies. Some of them may

have hadchance to work with Google Adwords so their requirements and expectations from OADS arestated more clearly and in detail.

There are also two main types of publishers: big websites and small websites/blogs. They havedifferent views and expectations to the system. Usually publishers with big websites requestedmore complicated report and customization from the system since they easily to realize whatthe system can bring them. In other hand, small website owners they actually do not care muchabout they need from the system, what they really care is whether the system is feasible to beapplied and whether they can make real money from their website.

From what we obtained through those interviews, we have concluded that what they care mostabout is the system reliable:

-

Advertisers want to know that if they will lose their money because of fraud,

-

Publishers wonder whether the system will provide the correct report about how manyclicks and impressions. The reason is that this information will directly affect their income andtheir reputation to the publishers.

From that scope and vision of the system, we decide to design and implement a more stable,reliable, high-performance system rather than spending time on implement complicatedfunctionality from the early state of the system. We also realize that the most obstacles need tobe overcome to apply the OADS system into the real life is the trust from both sides: advertisersand publishers. If they do not believe in the system’s capability, the system becomes useless.

In the next part of this chapter, based on our research, we provide a brief understanding aboutbusiness models as well as simple system requirement analysis.

3.1.

ONLINE ADVERTISING SCENARIO AND GENERAL SOLUTION

3.1.1.

Common online advertising scenario

Since the current growing of number internet users

in Vietnam, when a company (advertiser)has products or services need introduce or advertise to many people in specific segment liketeenagers, female, kids etc. Internet users will take an important part. Internet has beenbecoming more and more important for advertiser to spread out the information about theproduct or service to Internet users.

13

3.1.2.

General solution

in Vietnam and its disadvantages

In their advertising campaigns, advertisers will have to following 3 main steps:

-

Do advertising research and create advertisements:they

can be video, images,etc…

-

Choose the websites to display advertisements in a specific period. These websites

(publishers) can befamous

online news, a technology forum, to afamous and high trafficblog etc.

-

Work with those websites to negotiate the price and sign contract with them to run theadvertisements.

The cost for this banner that the advertiser has to pay is depended on the position of thebanner on the advertising websites and the campaign’s duration. This cost could be paid atonce or many times depending on the contractbetween the advertiser and advertisingcompany.

This way of advertising

process

has

many disadvantages, which

can be listed out as follow:

-

Advertisers have to work with many publishers; the process is very slow, costly, and timeconsuming.

-

There are no guarantee on how the advertisement performance since their no concrete andtrusted report, especially report from the third party.

-

There is no way that advertisers can control how their campaigns

are

going. They cannotknow which banner is performing better,

which should disable and there is no way foradvertiser to disable an advertisement beside have to work directly with every publisher.

-

The process is not capable for small businesses like a small online shop when they justdisplay ads in a small period or

target.

-

It is not cost effective for advertisers since advertisers have to pay for publisher not basedon performance of the advertisement but they have to buy the whole package.

-

No way for small publishers like small forum or blogs can earn money throughadvertisements since advertisers do not have time to work with every publishers.

Figure6

-

A sample of banner advertisement in an online news website in Vietnam.

14

-

There is no report for advertiser to tracking and forecast for future campaign, they also donot know in which site the advertisement if performing better, which site has lead moresales etc…

These many limitations for current solution can be improved or avoided by using OADSadvertising network. Besides, OADS will provide a lot of functionality for both advertisers tomake them saving times and money, doing better marketing

campaign and publishers to earnmore and to reach more advertisers.

3.2.

OADSSystemDescription

3.2.1.

Systems Context

OADS interacts with four kinds of users. They are advertiser, publisher,Internet

user, and OADSstaff.

Figure7

-

System Context Diagram

o

Advertiser:

Advertiser is one who wants to advertise and introduce their products,services or brands to end user (their customers)

o

Publisher:

Publisher is one who participates in the advertising network of OADS. He/shecould be blogger, web admin, web master or website member… who hasown ormanagethe content of his/her blog or website or webpage. He/she is one who helpsOADS brings the message of advertiser to users (Internet

users).

o

Internet

user:

Internet

users

are

ordinary people

who useInternet. In OADS,Internet

user is targeted

user of online advertising who will view or click on advertisements.

o

OADS staff:OADS staff is one who manages the operations of OADS.

15

3.2.2.

Main Features of OADS

OADS

has twomain features:

Advertisement distributionand Advertisement tracking

& report

3.2.2.1.

Advertisement Distribution:

The

main role of OADS is to redistribute the advertisements across different websites ofpublishers so that it can bringthe most profit to publishers and most benefit to advertisers. Intheory, the ultimate goal of Advertisement Distribution is to display theright message, to theright person, at the right time. In more detail, the system should be able to detect andunderstand the need of users based on its user’s profile and the website context, then whenusers want to, say, buy a new clothes, the OADS display right there the advertisement ofclothing.

By this way, we can avoid a lot of wasting money of advertisers for advertising to wrong userswho do not need their product. It also brings much more revenue to publishers since theeffectiveness of advertisement is improved, the click-through-rate is increased, and the CPCand CPM prices are increased.

As our research and implementation of OADS, there is another big challenges of AdvertisementDistribution feature is it has to be very scalable. Since working as a center for storing andretrieving advertisement units for many website, the performance of OADS has to play acriticalpart.

Figure8

-

OADS Features

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3.2.2.2.

Advertisement tracking and report

One of the most important components of OADS that can affect its success is the tracking andreport capability of the system. No matter how good OADS can distribute advertisement but itcannot tracking its advertisements and providing a comprehensive report about how everyadvisement was performed, it becomes useless and no one will use it.

The system should have capability of tracking every activity, every click and every impression, ofadvertising performance. The logged information including when and where an activityhappened (the publisher’s website URL), information about the users who saw and clicked ads(IP, cookie, user agent etc.), what type of ad and ad owner (advertiser) has been displayed, howmuch it cost for advertisers, how much publishers can earn for the activity. In short, trackingsystem should can answer who, where, when, how much for every activity. This is the only waythat we can gain the truth for OADS users (publishers and advertisers).

Come with tracking system, there should be reports available for publishers and advertisers.Report should come with different forms, including raw report, graphic report. In other hands,users can select the range of report, for examples, for a specific time. It could be better to bringusers withcapability to filter report based on different type of filters (channel, category, ofadvisement unit).

3.2.3.

Other Important Features of OADS

3.2.3.1.

For Publishers



Get advertisement HTML code:

this is vital for publisher, there must be a way forthem to get theiradvertisement code to insert into their website to display OADSadvertisement unit. Publisher should be able to choose the style of advertisementlike width, height, background-color, font-style etc. They also may want to choosethe category of advertisements. Every time publishers specify properties for a newadvertisement code, we call it Publisher Advertisement Unit (Publisher Ad-Unit)



Channel

Management:

there should be a way for publishers to managing PublisherAd-Unit. To do this, OADS help publishers

to categorize their Ad-Unit intochannel.Achannel can contain many Publisher Ad-Units. Publishers can use channel fordifferent purpose like tracking the effectiveness for different group of Ad-Unit ortracking revenue stream for each group.



Payment Management system: Since publishers will be paid every month, thereshould be a place for them to monitoring the payments, as well as keep track ofrevenue or any problems with the payments, for example, payment did not comeetc. This could be quite complicated since there are source of revenue are based onhow many clicks and impressions have been made in their website, but every clicksand impressions have different prices. It has not said that the fraud protectionsystem will make it more complicated.

3.2.3.2.

ForAdvertisers



Campaign Management:

including creating, editing, deleting advertising campaignthrough web-based interface. Nice and easy to use interface which is intuitive to useand understand for advertisers. It should imitate the way that advertisers manage

17

advertisements in real world. It should also be available for advertisers topause

Advertisement Management:Ability to upload, update, delete, manage every singleadvertisement unit. OADS should also provide a way for advertisers to look back inthe history to find advertisements units created in finished campaign. One of mostimportant functions of advertisement management is that advertisers can changethe bid price for advertisement unit: the CPC and CPM cost for every singleadvertisement unit.



Billing management:

OADShas

to provide a way for advertiser to control theiraccount money, this includes how much they have deposited, how much they havespent. Billing component should come with a very convenient transaction log.

3.2.3.3.

For OADS Staffs



OADS ownersplay

the role of system administration board. We are broker to createthe connection between advertisers and advertising network (a network ofpublishers). We do administration works to make sure the system operates in theway it should do.



Membership management:Monitoring all members in the advertising network andadvertisers, assigning roles to suitable members and managing their accessibilities.



Operation supports:OADS

has to provide tools for its staffs to manage theoperations and processes of the system, especially in budget deposit of advertisersand payment of publishers.



Problem solving supports:

OADS provides its operators with means to keep trackand findoutthe evidences for any complaints coming from advertisers or publishers.

3.2.3.4.

For Internet Users



Internet usersplay

the role of advertising audiences. They interact directly with theadvertisement. Therefore, OADS has to provide the ability to keep track and receivethe information of actions that audiences performed on advertisements.OADSshould provide audiences with the advertisements related to their concerns forimproving the performance of advertising activities.

3.3.

Glossary

In this part, we introducethe definitions for the key concepts in Online Advertising DistributionSystem.



Advertising:isa non-personal form of promotion that is delivered through selectedmedia outlets that require the marketer to pay for message placement under mostcircumstances.



Advertiser:is one who wants to advertise and introduce their products, services orbrands to end user (their customer)

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

Advertisement:

is a public promotion of product or service. In the scope of OADS, it is amedium to describe the product or service such as an image or a video movie …



Advertisement Type:defines the kind of advertisement such as image or video…



Advertisement Category:represents the field to which the advertisement belongs. It isused to group similar advertisements together such as traveling, construction,computing device, book etc.



Publisher:is one who participates in the network of OADS. He/she could be blogger,web admin, web master… who has ability to manage the content of his/her blog orwebsite. He/she is one who helps OADS brings the message of advertiser to end users(Internet users).



Advertisement Unit:is an advertisement, which is selected by publisher. Itis meaningfulto publishers only. For example, company A (advertiser) has one advertisement namedABC. The publisher B chooses ABC to be the advertisement that he/she wants tointroduce to end user on his website. At thattime,

ABC becomes advertisement unit ofpublisher B.



Advertisement Instance:is a copy of advertisement. It is created each time the end userview the advertisement.Every time an end user clicks on or awebpage displays animage or a video, that image or video is considered as an instance of advertisement.



Click:Click is atop tap

on amouse button, pressing it down and then immediatelyreleasing it. In OADS, a mouse click can only be accepted when the cursor pointing on abanner at the time the click action is performed.



Impression:Impression is an advertisement's appearance on an accessedwebpage.



Pay per click (PPC):The fee that advertiser needs to pay to publisher for every click ofend user.



Cost per thousand impression (CPM):The fee that advertiser needs to pay to publisherfor every thousand impression that an advertisement is viewed by end users.



Report:Report is a special document that summarizes statistics related toadvertisements. It is used to keep track the effectiveness of advertising activities.



Taxonomy:is the practice and science of classification. We will build the distributionsub-system of OADS based on taxonomy algorithm to choose the right advertisement todisplay.



FraudPrevention:is a process/system that is used for avoiding the fraud activities ofmalicious users, mainly publishers. These activities can include faking clicks orimpressions on advertisements, or creating software, spy-ware, virus script to increaseillegal earning.



Fraud Detection:Fraud protection is a process/system that is used for detecting andeliminating the fraud activities of malicious users, mainly publishers. These activities caninclude identify fakedclicks or impressions on advertisements to increase illegal earning.

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4.

CHAPTER4

–

SYSTEM MODELING

4.1

Key use-

cases

The key functional requirements of the system describe above can be summarized into the use-casediagram as follow:

<<extends>>

<<extends>>

<<includes>>

Advertisement

Management

Advertisement

Distribution

Fraud

Management

Report

Management

Campaign

Management

Channel

Management

Internet UserAdvertiserOADS StaffPublisherAdministration

BudgetDeposit

Payment

OADS

Figure9

-

OADS Use Case

20

4.2

Systemarchitecture

OADS is a web application designed as athree-layers application

Now we consider the high-level model of OADS that shows how the key functions of thesystem works before digging into the technical structure of the system.

4.2.1

Advertisement distribution

Figure11

-

Advertisement Distribution Model

OADS

Application

Database management system

Browser

Presentation Layer

Business Logic Layer

DataLayer

Configuration

Security

Figure10

-

System Architecture

21

OADS has its own a network of publishers who are the owners or members of websites, blogs,forums, or social network…They register as members of OADS and joininto the advertisingnetwork of OADS.

o

Step 1:Advertisercreates an online advertising campaign,and then

uploads

advertisements (text, image or video) into OADS.

o

Step 2:

o

OADS will manage these advertisements by its advertisement managementSub-System, and then distribute these advertisements to publishers’ websites, blogs,forums, or social network…via their webpage.

Step 3: When requested,OADS will choose a suitable advertisement to distribute to thewebpage has raised the request. At that time, Advertisement DistributionSub-System

ofOADS willcreate a secure key associated with the action for TrackingSub-System

tocheck the validity ofthe action performed on the advertisement later.

4.2.2

Impression tracking

Figure12

-

Impression Tracking Model

o

Step 1,2, and 3: These steps are described in the previous part-

advertisementdistribution

o

Step 4: after the advertisement loaded successfully, the webpage will display it and sendthe impression information to OADS via Web API of OADS.

o

Step 5: OADS uses the information received from the webpage, ask Fraud ManagementSub-System

to validate the impression, and records it for

reporting later.

22

4.2.3

Click tracking

Figure13

-

Click tracking model

o

Step 1,2, and 3: These steps are described in the previous part-

advertisementdistribution

o

Step 4: For internet user perform the click action on theadvertisement, theadvertisement must be loaded and displayed. This means that the impression must beperformed first, and of course, it is recorded. Then when user click on the advertisementdisplayed, the information related to the click is sent to OADS.

o

Step 5: OADS will handle clicks. In this case, we choose Middle Page as click handler.When OADS receives a click, it will generate an instance of Middle Page to processclick’s information.

o

Step 6a & 6b: The middle page will check the validity of theclick, record it, and thenredirect the user to the target website, which is specified by advertiser and associatedwith the advertisement.

With advertisement distribution system and advertisement tracking system, OADS not onlyprovides advertisers with tools to manage their online advertising campaigns but also measurethe effectiveness of each campaign.

Here is the high-level structure of OADS.

23

OADS includes nine packages described below with their main components inside listed.

4.2.4

Data Provider

Data provider is in data access layer of the application.This package performs all transactionsbetween the application and database server that stores all the information used